Article

Fraud is a problem for every business, but especially for businesses that accept online payments or provide cryptocurrency exchange and investment services. Many fraudsters are opening new fraudulent accounts, buying products with stolen credit card numbers, and stealing identities to use for obtaining financial loans or cryptocurrency investments. As a result, many companies are using identity verification data and machine learning (ML) to help fight against fraudsters and reduce the number of chargebacks caused by fraudulent transactions.

Today we thought we would take a look at Abra, a bitcoin-based digital currency wallet app provider that is using the Whitepages Pro Identity Check API to strengthen their machine learning fraud detection model in order to help guard their business against the risk of chargebacks.

About Abra

Abra is an app that allows users to manage their Bitcoin and Ethereum investments – users can buy and store Bitcoin as well as exchange Bitcoin for any other fiat currency or cryptocurrency that’s supported in the app. The app also allows users to track the progress of their cryptocurrency and fiat currency investments.

Why Abra Decided to Look for New Sources of Identity Data

Ivan Galli, Abra’s VP of Operations, and Ryan Chiu, Senior Business Analyst at Abra, told us that before choosing Whitepages Pro, the company relied on a number of vendors to provide information on user data. However, Abra’s analysts realized that the signals returned by various data vendors had slightly different values and each service used only provided a particular signal in the broader set of details that the company wanted to analyze. The company needed to supplement the information that was being fed to their fraud detection model. In addition, with the surge of interest in cryptocurrency, came a surge in prospective new users, so improving their fraud model was important.

After researching data vendors, Abra chose Whitepages Pro and integrated the Identity Check API with their model. Whitepages Pro was implemented along with a multitude of vendors giving the company the ability to identify their users.

The Whitepages Pro Identity Check API

The Identity Check API is an enterprise-grade, RESTful API that, in a single query, returns 70+ data signals and network insights. The information returned in the API response provides validity flags, positive and risk attributes, and match statuses between key consumer data elements. When integrated with ML fraud detection models and applications, the API helps companies catch discrepancies, research chargebacks, and quickly weed out fraud distinct match statuses.

The Results After Integrating the API

The Identity Check API has helped improve the effectiveness of Abra’s fraud detection model. The company uses other vendors to validate user details, but occasionally the services would not be able to triangulate who the user actually is. Whitepages Pro has helped Abra identify customers in these situations by giving the company additional signals that other data providers could not.

A Strengthened Fraud Detection Model

Abra started using Whitepages Pro not only to supplement their information but also aggregate the information into one API call. Galli and Chiu said that Whitepages Pro not only confirms or challenges signals that they have already, but also provides additional dimensions on user details that can help give them more confidence in their fraud decisions. They also said that Whitepages Pro gave them a comprehensive response to all the details that they provide to the service.

“Whitepages Pro gave us the ability to look at our users from many different angles from one source, which gave us confidence in coming up with a succinct and accurate assessment of the IDs of our users,” said Galli.

For more information about Whitepages Pro Identity Check, visit the product web page.